Pick a Patent with Google

IP practitioners love to carp about the free patent search site offered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The search engine is clunky, the .pdf files don't load, it takes forever. But its free (a.i.b.) so you couldn't complain too much.

Now there is a new player in town -- the Google Patent Search (beta). It claims to cover the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO. That would be all patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006 -- approximately 7 million patents. It is said to use the same algorithms used by the very popular Google Book Search. The results are fast and easy to read and open on just about every browser on the block.

Needless to say, this opens up a wealth of entirely frivolous searches, such as patents granted to Michael Jackson (for a collection of 17 other "celebrity patents" check out this link) and "an apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force".